1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a device and method for online user interaction; particularly, a device and method for facilitating user-defined structured forms of online conversation.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Despite the continued explosive growth in the popularity and use of the Internet, support for social interaction in online communities remains limited and primitive. In particular, no online support is available for structured styles of interactions (genres) online, which can be defined by, and modified by the end-users—even during usage; and which enable user-defined rules of enforcement.
To better understand genres, consider the following example of a structured interaction. In a lecture concerned with computer-mediated communication, there is a speaker and an audience of spectators. When the lecture begins—somehow signaled by the speaker—all spectators fall silent to listen to the speaker present her lecture. Assuming that all questions are to be held to the end of the lecture, the speaker is never interrupted. Once the speaker has finished her presentation—another event somehow signaled by the speaker—spectators are able to ask questions. To do so, a given spectator must raise his hand and wait to be called upon by the speaker; no talking out of turn is allowed. Once a given spectator is selected by the speaker, he can ask his question, the content and presentation of which should be short. Once asked, the speaker responds to the question, the presentation here being arbitrarily long. Following her answer, the speaker, then either accepts another question, or ends the lecture. Note that the roles present in this lecture interaction include: the speaker (one particular user), one or more spectators (the other active users), and, when selected, a questioner (one of the spectators, one who “raised his hand” and as then been called upon by the speaker). Note also how the “speaker” and “spectators” always refer to the same particular individuals, while the “questioner” changes, often being undefined (i.e., when no one is asking a question). If a spectator was to shout out a question at an inappropriate time, the speaker could merely chide the offending spectator, telling him to wait for the question section, or, if the spectator was truly abusive, the speaker could have the offending spectator removed from the premises.
For further detail on genres, see Thomas Erickson “Social Interaction on the Net: Virtual Community as Participatory Genre,” accessible via URL: http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/VC_as_Genre.html. Examples of online interaction facilities follow:
FTP allows online users “anonymous”—to have access to a collection of documents; one or more users being authorized to add documents to the collection. No other styles of interaction are definable by the users. (See Ed Krol, The Whole Internet Catalog. O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. Sebastopol, Calif. 1992 for details).
NNTP or network news, provides a venue in which users can asynchronously post messages and responses into administered news groups (i.e., predefined groups of messages which are meant to relate to specified topic, e.g., all articles in alt.sport.soccer should deal with soccer). Only loosely structured forms of interaction are provided, e.g., query-and-respond, which are not then enforced. No other styles of interaction are user definable.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is similar to NNTP in that it allows users to post messages and responses to each other in predefined topic areas—called channels in IRC. The main difference with IRC is that the interactions are synchronous rather than asynchronous as in NNTP. Just as with NNTP, IRC does not enable users to define structured forms of interaction which include rules of enforcement.
Loom, a visualization tool for Usenet (NNTP) news groups, provides a technique for displaying the emotional mood (e.g., hostile, happy) of an NNTP-based online community (e.g., a Usenet newsgroup) by analyzing the content of its interactions. Although this utility can analyze online interactions and provide a graphical representation of aspects of the interactions, it does not provide a way for users to define structured styles of interaction. (See Judith Donath et al. “Visualizing Conversation” published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Conversation. Volume 4, number 4, June 1999)
Babble provides dynamic indicators of the presence and activity of all operational users with respect to the available topics (i.e., discussion areas created by the users). These indicators are computed using the activities of the participants (e.g., connections, postings and topic switches). Although lightly structured styles of interaction are frequently adopted (e.g., interaction in the “—Commons Area—” is informal conversation, while interaction in the “Babble Problems” topic consists of serious question/answer dialogs), no way is provided for users to formally specify structured styles of interaction and then have them enforced. (See Thomas Erickson, et al. “Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of ‘Babble.’” published in Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI '99. ACM Press, 1999.)
Online games, like chess and bridge (e.g., Chessmaster 6000 by Mindscape, Inc.), provide structured and enforced styles of interaction, but not ones that (1) can be defined by the users, the rules all being predefined; (2) that can have the rules changed by the users during a game (e.g., “A queen can leap from anywhere to anywhere”); and (3) that include user defined rules of enforcement.
Coordinator, a method of structuring human communications, provides an electronic mail-based system that allows users to structure conversations and track tasks. For example, a typical interaction begins with a “Request” message from person A to person B, requesting something from person B by a certain date. This e-mail note asks Person B to respond with a “Promise” message (promising to perform the action), with a “Decline” message (declining to perform the action), or with a “Counteroffer” message (offering to perform the action by a different date or to perform a different action). If B promises to do the action, then a typical conversation might continue with B, eventually sending a “Report completion” message (indicating that the action has been performed) and A replying with a “Close” message (indicating that the action was performed satisfactorily). (See: Flores et al. “Method and Apparatus for Structuring and Managing Human Communications By Explicitly Defining the Types of Communications Permitted Between Participants.” U.S. Pat. No. 5,208,748 May, 4, 1993.)
The Oval implementation of Coordinator extends the base functionality by allowing end-users to modify interaction rules mid interaction (see Malone et al. “Experiments with Oval: A Radically Tailorable Tool for Cooperative Work” via URL http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP181/index.html#4b).
Thus Coordinator, implemented with Oval allows users to define and maintain structured styles of online interaction. Users are still unable to (1) provide rules of enforcement; (2) switch from one user-defined genre to another during a given interaction (e.g., reassign the roles of the participants); and (3) handle interactions where messages are posted to a group of recipients, all of whom are not known a priori (e.g., as is the case in an online lecture where the speaker broadcasts his speech to whomever is listening). Coordinator/Oval does allow users to specify rules specifying the graphic/iconic representation of the state of their conversations, initial, as well as the for the effect of rule violations (e.g., a particular change in the color of interrupter's icon).
Thus, there exists a need for a method and apparatus enabling user-defined structured styles of interaction (genres) online which includes rules of enforcement. A need also exists for a method enabling users to modify and/or replace a given genre during use. And, a need exists for dynamically updated genre state indicators (graphical representations) whose graphic behaviors are defined by the end-users.